Opinion: Gambling a double-edged sword

Increasing government reliance on revenues unwise

A poker game is played on the Ultimate Gaming website in Las Vegas. Ultimate Gaming began offering Internet gambling in Nevada this year, and now New Jersey residents and visitors will be able to start gambling online Monday.

It's hard to remember, but a half-century ago, government support of gambling was pretty much taboo.

There were many reasons for this, including the toll illegal gambling had been taking in the mid-20th century on people's lives. At that time, the mob was deeply involved, and it got to the point where government commissions and prosecutors went after gambling hard.

But then government began to get into the gambling business itself through lotteries. The argument in many states was that the lottery would raise more money for educational spending. We all know now that this wasn't necessarily the case - the new revenue was more likely to open up spending opportunities elsewhere in state governments.

By the late 1980s, Indian-run casinos had become legal, and suddenly you could gamble all day or evening in places other than Las Vegas and Atlantic City. As Indian tribes running such casinos prospered, more pressure grew for non-Indian casinos to open. Government being what it was, there was a clear opportunity to develop more revenue. And so more casinos are opening in more states.

Along the same track, individual state lotteries have morphed into multi-state games such as Powerball and Mega Millions. A bigger jackpot, more gambling, more revenue.

Now, the push is to sanction and benefit from online gambling. Delaware and Nevada are considering letting people play poker online with each other. Delaware Gov. Jack Markell and Nevada Gov. Thomas Cook are talking about, as Markell put it, "the importance of having a good-sized pool of players online."

Just across Delaware Bay, New Jersey is also going live with Internet gambling, which is becoming known by the shorthand of iGaming. Clearly, the momentum is starting, and if these states succeed, we'll see it in other places before long.

Nonetheless, there are troubling aspects to this trend.

For one, many avid gamblers tend to be people who can't necessarily afford losing money - in the lottery, in a casino or at their laptop screen. All those millions in revenue that benefit governments and the private parties that organize the gambling have to come from somewhere. In many cases, those millions come from what would otherwise be savings for middle-class or lower-middle-class families.

Second, gambling is potentially addictive behavior. Just as not everyone who has a glass of wine becomes an alcoholic, not everyone who gambles will succumb to the fever of having a piece of the action. But some people will, destroying livelihoods and families. Think of all the news stories in recent years across the country where a treasurer of a small business or some government official has been discovered embezzling vast sums. Inevitably, the culprit has a gambling habit and has been blowing the money in casinos.

If government continues to promote the proliferation of gambling, some unknown number of gambling addictions will also occur. That takes a toll not only on private lives but on public services. At the very least, a continued expansion of gambling should be met with a continued expansion of public funding to combat gambling addiction.

Finally, there is the very real question of whether government truly needs all this revenue. In the 1960s, before the spread of lotteries and everything else, local and state governments tended to get by just fine. Today, many state and local governments struggle with financial choices and balance even though gambling money is now part of the picture.

In its own way, is government stretching its spending beyond reasonable limits based on the somewhat empty promises of gambling money as a panacea? This is a fair question to ask. At some point, expanding government-sanctioned gaming reflects government's insatiable need for more dollars and runs counter to the preference for smaller government that is prevalent here on the Delmarva peninsula. Adding iGaming on top of casinos on top of lotteries is merely an example of feeding the beast further.

It might be far better, for taxpayers and society alike, if governments focused less on seeking a bigger slice of pie from gaming revenue and instead went about the more difficult task of showing fiscal restraint and providing services that add to the quality of life in our states and communities.

The gambling train has certainly left the station. But that doesn't mean it can't be slowed down to serve the greater good.